Alisa Wade - History Department
"Wives, Widows, Executrixes: The Familial Politics of Elite Women’s Inheritance in Early National New York City"
Friday December 3, NOON
Click for ZOOM or Join with Meeting ID: 890 6409 3770 and Passcode: humanities
This project studies a series of familial inheritance disputes in post-Revolutionary New York City, revealing the ways that cultural practices of inheritance among the city’s elites impacted women’s ability to protect their financial standing. Widows frequently found themselves in precarious positions, dependent upon the goodwill of male relatives, the estate’s executors, or social or familial networks to ensure economic security. Yet, as this project argues, while these women rarely insisted on individual protections and instead depended on social networks for material stability, they did so within the confines of what it calls “the business of family”: ultimately absorbing personal risk in order to ensure the success of the next generation.
Luz Bermúdez - Visiting Scholar, History Department
"Social History through the Act of Naming San Cristobal de Las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico)"
Friday, February 4, Noon
Click for ZOOM or Join with Meeting ID: 890 6409 3770 and Passcode: humanities
Dr. Bermúdez will talk about her book in progress, City of Names. A Sociocultural History of San Cristobal de Las Casas. She will address some of the underlying historical reasons for the remarkable number (ten!) of different names that have been used for the former capital of Chiapas (Southeast Mexico).
This long list of names was for a long time viewed as a mere historical “curiosity”. However, the act of naming may go further than an act of territorial denomination; it is also a symbolic appropriation and at the same time a way of imposing socio-cultural aspects (such as migratory flows, ethnic influences and overlapping relationships of rivalry, authority and subordination) in this geographical and mentally-constructed space.
In that sense, the questioning of the diverse names given to current San Cristobal de Las Casas can help to explain some of the dramas of the city at different times during more than four centuries (1524-1943). The aim is to overcome reductive views of social relations under rigid antagonistic models, to rethink the historical, ideological and cultural mechanisms that perpetuate inequalities in Chiapas as in other parts of Mexico and Latin America.
